Scientists study the world to gather knowledge. Engineers utilize this knowledge to solve problems and create a better world. This blog is about using biological knowledge to engineer better gardens, more efficient systems, tastier foods, and, well, anything else I can think of.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Carbon Reduction vs. Carbon Sequestration

Look, no bare ground under these cows' hooves

I recently had a discussion online
about the feasibility of sequestering carbon in the soil vs. just reducing how
much we produce. I have seen many articles lately where scientists say that it
just isn’t feasible to sequester carbon in the soil as the soil just doesn’t
hold enough carbon. I contended that this is incorrect and that it indicates a
lack of understanding of grassland ecosystems. See, the grasslands rely very,
very heavily on the carbon in the soil.

Unlike trees, which can suck up
huge amounts of water when it rains to help them survive dry times, grasses don’t
really have the luxury. They need to have the water in the soil where they can
use it. They do this by having deep roots that they store energy in as the growing season ends and use as a food source during the beginning of the next growing season. The
tissues that are left behind rot and add to the carbon content of the soil.
Some prairie grasses can have roots that run as deep as twelve feet, but will
routinely run three to four feet deep in most cases. The carbon, when added to
the soil, helps the soil act more like a sponge, soaking up rains and causing
very little runoff. This water is stored in the soil where the grasses can
access it to extend their growing season.

Naturally the conversation led to
Holistic Management and Allan Savory’s methods and I shared his TED video. One
person in the discussion shared in turn a take-down of said TED talk and I
found it rather interesting. Again, the rebuttal says that it is simply not
feasible to store the carbon in the soils. So, naturally, being the nerd that I
am, I thought I’d do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation on this. How much
land would we have to holistically manage to bring carbon back to
pre-industrial levels?

So first of all, let me pull a
couple of numbers from the two sources themselves.

Allan Savory says in the video that
about 2/3 of the world’s grasslands are desertifying. My research tells me that
the earth’s landmasses are 57.5 million square miles. Two thirds of that is
38.3 million square miles. He also says that we can restore half of the world’s
grasslands and bring the carbon in the atmosphere back to pre-industrial
levels. So half of that is 19.2 million square miles. So we have 19.2 million
square miles to restore.

Switching to the article rebutting
the video, let me pull the next number from there. The article says that there
are currently 240 Petagrams (a petagram is 1 trillion Kilograms) more of carbon in
the atmosphere now than in pre-industrial times. So this means that we need to
find a way to sequester 240 trillion kilograms of carbon into 19.2 million
square miles. Sounds daunting, but let’s make some assumptions and run the
numbers.

First of all, we need to set some
numbers relating to carbon in soil. So let me start by saying that as a
percentage of total soil, carbon percentage will be calculated by volume, not
by weight. This is typically how that’s done. So how much does it weigh? I did
a little research (okay, I asked a friend who has a PhD in soils engineering)
and what is commonly called “muck soil” or 100% organic matter, has a specific
gravity of 0.25 grams per cubic centimeter. Yup, it is pretty light. But it isn’t
100% carbon. It is composed of a few
other elements, mostly hydrogen and oxygen. Even though carbon dioxide also
contains oxygen, let’s make this a little more conservative and assume that
only 50% of that muck soil is actual carbon.

Now to depth. That’s the tricky
part, isn’t it? We tend to think that an inch of topsoil is good. But that is
more a forest environment. Grassland environments tend to pump the soil much
deeper. The bunching grasses that make up those environments almost universally
send their roots three feet deep or more, sometimes over ten feet. But let’s
make the calculation conservative again, shall we? Let’s only count the top foot
of soil in this calculation.

First, let’s narrow this down. How much
carbon do we need to sequester per acre of soil?

So 13%, and a conservative estimate
at that. It can take a while to reach that level. I think 1-2% is reasonable in
the first year. Maybe in a decade or two we can reach 13%, maybe even 20%. But
let’s talk context a little here. First of all, the biggest impediment of this
kind of solution is not the enormity of the task. It is that, for some reason,
people who want to help, people who want to do the right thing, are throwing their
might against this idea. They are dismissing it out of hand and saying that it
just won’t work. No, this isn’t the only solution, but it is a big one. It can
do a huge amount of good. So why are people spending so much time opposing it?

Second, right now, those same soils
are degrading at a rapid rate and turning into deserts. To do that, they have
to lose the carbon they once stored. So those same soils are currently
contributing to the carbon in the atmosphere at a rate that I don’t think is
fully understood. Just reversing that and turning them from a source to a sink
would make a huge difference.

This is a subject I have read a lot
about, studied extensively. And the second article, the one that is attempting
a take-down of Holistic Management, falls prey to a logical error, and it is
a big one. The first is that grassland ecosystems and forest ecosystems work
the same. They don’t. The grasslands function very differently. The article
tries to simplify the functioning of an entire environment down into a few
simple formulas. It isn’t that simple, though, and can’t be simplified like
that. The cycle of the animal impact is intimately connected with the water
cycle and the mineral cycle. Without that understanding, any logical argument
about why this solution won’t work is fundamentally flawed.

Ultimately, though, we can reduce the carbon output all we want, but as long as nothing is sequestering the carbon away, we are fighting a losing battle. We need to be finding ways to lock the carbon back away where it belongs: in functional, living ecosystems.

3 comments:

ok one question. You calculated the total available square miles as 2/3rds of the total land mass on earth. Wouldn't that imply that we'd be planting grassland on most of the available land?

Perhaps an easier calculation:This article notes that there is about 26 tonnes per Ha of carbon stored in soil depths to 1 m.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13246/full

So we'd need 240 * 10^9 tonnes CO2, which is only 65*10^9 tonnes C, or 2.5 *10^9 Ha. There is about 3.5 *10^9 ha of grassland now, so we'd need to either increase the amount of carbon stored in current grasslands by 60%-ish percent, or increase the amount of grassland ecosystems by 60%-ish percent. Or some combination. Not impossible, but not easy.

Of course, this is a bit of a crazy discussion in the first place. No single technology or seqestration system can get us to the carbon reduction goals we need, but that doesn't mean that all of these technologies are failures.

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I am not an expert on any of the topics presented here, merely an enthusiastic hobbyist. I claim no responsibility for how this information is used and make no guarantees that it is completely accurate, only accurate to the best of my knowledge.